In recent years, South Korean cinema has fully flowered, producing both uncompromising highly personal films and crisp, intelligent genre movies, with Shiri the most spectacular example of the latter to date.
A beautifully tooled action thriller about love and terrorism.
63
New York PostJonathan Foreman
New York PostJonathan Foreman
The girl you see stabbing and shooting prisoners and fellow trainees makes the killer from "La Femme Nikita" look like a wuss.
50
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
The action looks impressive, even when nothing much is happening beyond local explosions or shattering glass, and the drama turns, affectingly, on a mysterious female sniper with a partitioned soul.
50
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
Americans, for better or worse, have already seen plenty of budget-busting action flicks with half-baked political pretensions.
50
San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
Suffers most from being overlong.
40
L.A. WeeklyPaul Malcolm
L.A. WeeklyPaul Malcolm
Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.
40
Chicago ReaderTed Shen
Chicago ReaderTed Shen
Shamelessly derivative and politically expedient.
20
Film ThreatPhil Hall
Film ThreatPhil Hall
A thoroughly awful Korean production which vainly attempts to recast the slam-bang conventions of American action-adventure flicks into the sticky world of contemporary Korean politics.